Scorpion Winter

by Andrew Kaplan

  Then, before he saw them, he heard them coming, men speaking Russian. Gabrilov appeared with two men in black jackets, both carrying guns. Even though Li Qiang was supposed to have told him to come alone, the meeting was enough out of the ordinary that Gabrilov was afraid to take chances. Unless they were there because Gabrilov had found out about Yang Hao.

  Gabrilov knocked on the door of the room where the RDV with Li Qiang was supposed to take place, then flattened himself out of the way against the wall, while his SVR bodyguards aimed at the door. When there was no response, he handed them the key and they went inside with a show of force, aiming their guns. A minute later, having found it empty, the two men came out of the room. One positioned himself in the hallway by the elevator; the other peered out from behind the staircase door.

  Scorpion put the glass to the wall and listened. There was nothing, only the sounds of Gabrilov moving around, sitting down. Time to go, he thought, slinging his pack over one shoulder, going to the window and opening it. Icy air instantly poured into the room.

  He stepped out, squatting onto the windowsill, fingers gripping the lintel. He tried not to look down at the street, six stories below. Pressing against the side of the building, he reached the toes of his left foot to the next door windowsill. It was longer than he had thought. He was about three inches short, would have to push off with a small leap and grab onto the next window’s lintel, hoping he didn’t make any noise. It was freezing cold. The alternative, he thought, was to have a shoot-out with the SVR guns in the hallway. Not for the first time, he thought about getting into a different line of work. Then he thought about what might happen if he didn’t stop the Russian invasion.

  He took a breath and half swung, half leaped, across to the other window. The front of his foot landed on the sill as he grabbed for the lintel. For an instant his fingers slipped and he felt himself falling, but managed to grab and hold on by his fingertips. Squatting, he looked into the room. Gabrilov was looking at the door. Scorpion raised the window up in a sudden move and aimed the Glock at Gabrilov who, hearing the sound, had turned around, his eyes wide.

  “Zatknis!” Scorpion hissed in Russian. Shut up! He motioned with the Glock for Gabrilov to raise his hands. Gabrilov started to say something. Scorpion shook his head no. He pulled the window the rest of the way up and stepped into the room.

  “Close the window,” Scorpion told him in English, frisking him as he went by. Gabrilov closed the window and turned around.

  “You!” Gabrilov said, his eyes narrowing.

  “Call your man by the elevator with your cell phone. Tell him to come in. You need help with something. Remember, Ya govoryu na russkom.” I speak Russian.

  “You speak govno shit Russian.”

  “True, but if you say the wrong thing, I’ll kill you.”

  Scorpion could see Gabrilov calculating, his eyes darting. He was putting it together, realizing that he had gotten to Li Qiang.

  “What is it you want?” Gabrilov said.

  “Call your man,” Scorpion said, coming close and touching the silencer muzzle to his head. Gabrilov took out his cell phone and called him.

  A moment later there were two knocks on the door, followed by two more knocks. Scorpion moved beside the door and nodded to Gabrilov, who came and opened the door.

  “Ostorozhna!” Gabrilov cried out. Look out! But it was too late. Scorpion had put the Glock to the SVR man’s head while grabbing the man’s pistol with his other hand and twisting it out of his grip. He kicked the door closed and pushed his knees against the back of the knees of the SVR man in front of him, forcing his legs to buckle. He pushed the man facedown to the floor.

  “Ne dvigat’sya.” Don’t move, he told the SVR man, glancing at Gabrilov, who started to back away. The look in Scorpion’s eyes stopped him. Covering both of them with the Glock, Scorpion grabbed his pack, took out the plastic ties and, using one hand, tied the SVR man’s feet together and his hands behind him. Then he got up, Gabrilov’s eyes never leaving him.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Scorpion said, twisting Gabrilov’s wrist while keeping the gun to his head to force him to sit on the floor. He kicked Gabrilov’s legs apart. “Remember. Zatknis,” he said. Shut up. Then he kicked Gabrilov between his legs as hard as he could.

  “Oyyyy! Sukin-sin!” Gabrilov moaned. You son of a bitch!

  “You have no idea,” Scorpion said. He crossed back to the SVR man and duct-taped his mouth, eyes, and ears. “Call the other one,” he said.

  Holding his groin with one hand, Gabrilov did as he was told. In a few minutes Scorpion had both SVR men bound, taped, and tied together, facing each other so one couldn’t use his hands to try to help the other. He took Gabrilov by the arm, and after checking the hallway, walked him to the room next door, Gabrilov gasping in pain at every step. Once inside, Scorpion used another plastic cuff to tie Gabrilov’s hands behind him and then propped him to sit on the floor against the bed. He sat down in a chair facing Gabrilov.

  “Now we can talk,” he said.

  “What you want, zhurnalist?” Gabrilov said, spitting out the word like an epithet.

  “Who killed Cherkesov?”

  Gabrilov shrugged. “How I should know?”

  “Pyatov was the bolvan—the idiot, the decoy. You used him to set up Iryna Shevchenko and me so Kozhanovskiy would lose the election. Except it wasn’t you. Russia wanted Cherkesov to be president.”

  “Is maybe Kitaiskim.” Chinese.

  “Get a new song. That one’s getting old,” Scorpion said. “The Chinese aren’t going to risk a war. Not over a pipeline that’s got to go through Russia anyway. So who did it? Who had something to gain by killing Cherkesov?”

  “CIA.” Gabrilov smirked. “You want assassin, look in mirror.”

  Scorpion shook his head. “The Americans don’t want a war in Europe any more than the Chinese.” He aimed the Glock at Gabrilov. “No more twenty questions, you mudak son of a bitch. Tell me or I’ll kill you.”

  “Even you kill, I not telling,” Gabrilov said, folding his arms over his chest.

  “Not even when I tell Yasenevo about the money the Guoanbu’s been depositing in your Pravex account?”

  Gabrilov stared at him. Scorpion could see his hands tremble.

  “It’s no longer a matter of the SVR and maybe just a bullet in the back of the head, is it? It’s the FSB, you fool,” Scorpion said. He waited. You can’t just lead the Joe all the way to the Promised Land, Koenig used to say. When it comes time for him to drop his pants, you have to let him come to it himself. People would rather die than face who they really are.

  “I not know,” Gabrilov said.

  Scorpion shook his head. “No good. Everything about the assassination came from you. No matter which way I turn, the compass needle points to you.” He stood up. Time to play his hole card. “I have to end this. Do I contact Checkmate?” he asked, referring to Ivanov, the legendary spymaster of the FSB.

  Scorpion waited for Gabrilov to get the picture. The FSB hated the SVR even more than they hated the CIA. He wanted Cherkesov to picture himself being questioned in Lubyanka. Especially about the money from the Chinese. From somewhere in the hotel, he heard the sound of a TV commercial, something about Obolon beer.

  “What you want, mister?” Gabrilov said at last.

  “No more lies. Who killed Cherkesov?”

  Gabrilov licked his lips. He looked lost. “His own peoples,” he said.

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “I not sure. You will find.”

  Jesus, it made sense, Scorpion thought. A power struggle within Svoboda. He was about to question Gabrilov about what the Russians really wanted when his cell phone vibrated. It was another message from Iryna.

  She texted: come now. urgent.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Darnytskyi

  Kyiv, Ukraine

  “Who’s the ski jacket in the van across the street?” Scorpion asked.

&nbs
p; “Danylo. Viktor sent him to—” Iryna started, but couldn’t finish because they were kissing, tongues searching, exploring, tearing off their clothes as if it were the first time; if anything, more intense. Bittersweet too, as if they sensed their time together was coming to an end. Afterward, in bed, she lit a cigarette and told him more.

  “You heard there was a riot in the Verkhovna Rada? Anyway, it’s settled. The elections will be postponed for three weeks. It hasn’t been made public yet, but Svoboda is going to announce that Lavro Davydenko will be the party’s new candidate for President.”

  “Who’s Davydenko?”

  “A nobody. A nonentity. He’s the kind of man that when he enters the room, you get the feeling someone just left,” she said, exhaling smoke angrily.

  “Why’d they pick him?”

  “He’s Gorobets’s man. If Gorobets sent him to fetch coffee, he’d do it. Ask him a question and he turns to Gorobets and says ‘What do you think, Oleksandr Maxymovych?’ Such a man—not a man, a thing! President! Now of all times!”

  “What happened?”

  “Didn’t you see the news? As prime minister, Viktor sent a request to NATO to stop the Russian invasion. NATO is meeting in emergency session. Viktor spoke on the phone with the American president. The Americans say they will issue a stern warning to the Russians. A stern warning!” She turned to him “The Americans. Can we trust them?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t do politics,” he hesitated. “Then too . . .”

  “Then too what?”

  “America has its own interests to look out for.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in a jar top she was using as an ashtray.

  “I smoke too much.”

  “You do,” he said.

  She turned to him on her side, her naked breast nudging his arm.

  “Did you find out anything?”

  “It’s not the Guoanbu. The Chinese made a show of interest in the new gas pipeline to distract the Russians from what they really want: new markets and gas for China.”

  “So who killed Cherkesov? The CIA?”

  “That’s what the SVR is trying to sell. Except you and I both know it’s not true.”

  She traced her finger down his face from his forehead down his nose and lips to his chin.

  “How do I know?”

  “You were with me,” he said. “It was an inside job. A power play inside Svoboda. So we just need to figure who stood to gain from Cherkesov’s death.”

  “Gorobets! He’s the big winner, especially if that clown, Davydenko, wins! He’ll be running the country. We’ll denounce him!” She sat up excitedly.

  “Right now everyone, including the politsiy, thinks we’re the killers. We need proof. We need the bomber.” He looked at her. “What was so urgent that you texted me?”

  “I heard from Oksana.”

  “Your mole in Gorobets’s office?”

  Iryna nodded. “She said something. Gorobets has a bodyguard. Big guy with scruffy blond hair in his eyes.”

  “Shelayev.” Scorpion nodded. The guy who crushed heads like eggshells. “What about him?”

  “She said she hasn’t seen him since the assassination. No one seems to know where he is, or if they do, they’re not saying.” She looked at Scorpion, her face with its pixie haircut barely visible in the darkness. “Could he be the assassin?”

  “He’s Gorobets’s man. And he’s Spetsnaz-trained. Possible, very possible.”

  “She said something else. It bothered me. That’s why I had to see you.”

  “What?”

  “She said that two days before the rally in Dnipropetrovsk she went to a café near the university here in Kyiv. She saw Shelayev having coffee with Alyona.”

  Scorpion sat up suddenly and slapped his forehead. “What an idiot! How stupid of me not to have seen it!” He looked at Iryna. “Did they see her?”

  “She didn’t think so. She hasn’t told anyone.”

  Scorpion gripped her shoulder. “You have to get hold of her! Tell her not to say a word to anyone. If she says anything, she’ll be killed. And especially nothing about Shelayev.”

  Iryna nodded. Scorpion got up and walked naked to the window. They were on the twelfth floor of a Left Bank apartment building that overlooked a bridge over the Dnieper, the lights from the bridge reflected on the ice in the river. The van with Danylo was still parked on the street below. Something about it bothered him, but he wasn’t sure what. He turned and looked at her.

  “Where did she live, Alyona?”

  “You know. The apartment near the Central Station.”

  “No, before then. Maybe with her parents or something. If she were in trouble, where would she go?”

  “Her father died. Her mother came from Bila Tserkva, I think. Gospadi, you don’t think she’s alive?”

  “Very unlikely. But whatever happened, she’s at the center of this thing,” Scorpion said, grabbing his clothes and starting to dress.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “When we get there, we’ll figure it out,” he said, turning on his laptop computer.

  He gave her the new identity cards he’d had Matviy make for her, one with the blond wig photo, the second with her pixie haircut.

  “How’d you get these?” she asked, studying the names she would be using.

  “Santa Claus. Shit!” he said, looking at the laptop screen after he had clicked onto the BBC’s news.bbc.co.uk website.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Have a look.” He turned the screen for her to see. There had been a shooting incident involving Russian troops at a border village called Vovchansk, near the city of Kharkov in eastern Ukraine. The headline was that Viktor Kozhanovskiy, acting as prime minister, was expected to announce a full mobilization of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at 0600 hours local time.

  “Gospadi,” she whispered. “It’s really happening. What will NATO and the Americans do?”

  Scorpion didn’t answer. He went back to the window and peered down from behind the curtain. The van was still there, no smoke coming from its exhaust. If Danylo had been sitting in it through the night, he would have frozen to death. An SUV was double-parked behind the van. As he watched, he saw five men crossing the street toward their building. He began grabbing things and shoving them into his backpack.

  “We have to go,” he said.

  This time she didn’t say a word. She immediately began cramming things into her carry-on. He went into the kitchen and rummaged like a madman through the pantry and under the sink, throwing contents and cans onto the floor. He found a bag of flour and two aerosol cans of cleaning spray. He came back to the main room, dumped the flour out of the bag onto the sagging sofa and tossed the cans on top.

  “Do you have any fluids? Perfume, nail polish, hair spray, anything?” he asked her.

  “Here. Why?” she said, digging in her handbag. She handed him a bottle of eau de cologne and another of nail polish remover. He poured them both over the sofa, the cans and the flour. He went back to the kitchen, turned on the gas in the oven but didn’t light it, and left the oven door open.

  “Give me your lighter,” he said, shoving her toward the door. She handed it to him, her hand shaking.

  “Do you ever leave an apartment normally?” she asked.

  “Apparently not in Ukraine,” he said, flicking the lighter and holding the flame to the drapes. When they started burning, he put the lighter flame to the spilled perfume and nail polish remover on the sofa. An acrid cloud of flame and smoke mushroomed up.

  “How do you say ‘fire’ in Ukrainian?” he asked as they headed out of the apartment.

  “Pozhezha.”

  “Come on,” he said, heading to the next apartment. He started pounding on the door and yelling, “Pozhezha! Pozhezha!” then ran to the next apartment and shouted and pounded again.

  Iryna ran the other way to another apartment, shouting, “Pozhezha! Dopomozhit!” Fire! Help!

  They ran past th
e elevator. It was coming up. As it did they shouted and pounded on other apartment doors on the floor. People, most in pajamas or half dressed, were coming out of their doors. They could smell smoke in the hallway. Scorpion spotted tendrils of smoke coming from the bottom and sides of their apartment door. Men, women, children, everyone began shouting, screaming, and rushing out of their apartments and into the halls.

  Scorpion grabbed Iryna’s hand and led her toward the staircase. Suddenly, a massive explosion rocked the hallway. It blasted the door off their apartment, lifting them off their feet and knocking them to the floor. A whoosh of flame shot out of the blasted doorway into the hall. People screamed in panic. Everyone began running.

  “Zabyraysya!” Get out! “Down the stairs! Hurry!” Iryna screamed in Ukrainian as she and Scorpion joined a cluster of people pounding down the staircase. On the floor below, she and Scorpion ran out to the hallway. They pounded on doors and shouted again, and when they got back to the staircase, a river of people were scrambling down.

  Scorpion spotted two men, one with a prison cross tattoo on the side of his neck, trying to come up the stairs. The two men were swamped by the people swarming down, and after a moment of trying to go against the tide hearing the cries of “Pozhezha!” they gave up and joined the flood of people running down the stairs. Scorpion and Iryna were swept with the crowd out into the frozen street.

  Iryna spotted the van. She started toward it, but Scorpion grabbed her arm and pulled her away. She struggled, trying to go back.

  “I have to see Danylo. Make sure he’s all right.”

  “He’s dead. Come on,” he said, pulling her with him.

  “How do you know?”